American Empire and Augustine’s Two Cities

“By our own vices, not by chance, have we lost the republic, though we retain the name.” St. Augustine, City of God, (bk. XI ch. 21) Augustine might just as well been speaking of the current American empire which, 1,600 years later, has succeeded its Roman antecedent, while apparently learning very little from its fate. That is the historical trajectory of all empires, however, and in the long run we shall fare no better than the rest: Macedonia, Rome, Spain, France, Britain, Soviet Union, etc.

President John Adams once remarked that the then new American republic was fit only for a moral and religious people, arguing that this republican system of government would only endure so long as God remained at the center of her citizen’s lives. The question is whether after 250 years of that experiment in self-government by and for the people we still fit the bill outlined by Adams. To any contemporary casual observer this once viably Christian land no longer seems to function within a Christian context. Granted, there are still a substantial number of Christians around, but their voices have become that of a minority. Even among those who claim to be Christians, what we too often see is a caricature of Christianity.

One recent example is the disturbing invocation by Secretary of War(crimes?) Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon as he seriously quoted a Biblical parody taken from the Hollywood movie Pulp Fiction. The Evangelical Hegseth lifted a gangster character’s take on Ezekial 25: 15-17 out of its movie context, invoking God to exact merciless vengeance on our enemies (the Iranian people) to basically expunge them from the face of the earth. More shocking was the Easter morning message by President Donald Trump on Truth Social where he profanely demanded Iran “open the f###ing Straits,” ending his vile tirade with a sarcastic “Praise be to Allah.” Days later, while still in Easter week, Trump threateningly posted, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be restored.” Presumably he was referring to that deeply rooted Persian civilization, well over 3,500years old before our American republic ever became a pipe dream. So what ever became of that aspect of Christianity which demands, “love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father.” (Mt.5: 44) Apparently we have adopted an exclusively “Old Testament” style Christianity as though the New Testament had never modified the former “eye for an eye” narrative.

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Zionism ~ the Collective Messiah

For they have not recognized the Hour of their Visitation.

The disastrously entangled situation in today’s Middle East can be said to revolve around a certain question: “Is the Old Testament a property deed in perpetuity, or is it something much greater, i.e., a binding spiritual covenant?” Modern day Zionists and the secular State of Israel generally accept only the first interpretation and are thereby willing to set the entire region ablaze in defense of that position. And yet we are told that upward of 70% of Jewish Israeli citizens are either secular, agnostic, or atheistic – more than confirmed by the highly secularized culture of Tel Aviv and other major Israeli urban centers. And while we in the West have long fretted about the threat of Communism to a Christian based social order, very few seem to recognize that Communism’s younger brother, political Zionism, may actually be the fatal ‘ism’ which draws mankind into a Third World War. Such a scenario appears to be more plausible today than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

The question then arises as to how Zionism is to be understood in the larger context of Judaism, a crucial distinction that many so-called Christian Zionists and Jewish pundits such as Ben Shapiro seem unwilling to address, despite the fact that there are thousands of orthodox and even many secular Jews who reject Zionism outright. Despite this inconvenient body of Jewish opposition, the Zionist program has expanded greatly over the past 75 years from its original stated goal of a shared Jewish homeland in Palestine into a far more ambitious agenda to transform the Israeli State into the dominant regional hegemon, the seizure of every square meter of Palestinian land, and now the rebuilding a 3rd Temple in Jerusalem, after 2,000 years, for the resumption of animal sacrifice.

Such a project would necessitate the destruction of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, one of the three most important pilgrimage sites in Islam, an act which would undoubtedly incite the world’s 2 billion Muslims to unprecedented fury. So why would any rational person or government risk such a volatile provocation? And yet it is no secret that countless Zionists of both Evangelical Christian and Jewish persuasions are working hard to achieve this very end which they understand full well would incite a geo-political upheaval of unimaginable scale: a worldwide religious war. It that indeed is their aim, then the American and Zionist State’s two recent perfidious sneak attacks on Iran in the midst of supposed ‘peace negotiations’ may merely represent the prelude to a much deadlier conflict.

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There’s Little Peace in Bethlehem

Christmas is a time to celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ. Sadly, the very ground where Christ once lived and taught and died to redeem mankind knows no peace today. The little town of Bethlehem, which witnessed the birth of the divine Prince of Peace, lies at the heart of the besieged West Bank of Palestine, held hostage to a twisted plot of diabolic sophistication which has enlisted even Christians and Western nations into its confused web of intrigue. The sudden fall of Syria to a Zionist-globalist funded and armed cabal of ‘good’ terrorists should hardly be a cause for celebration but for deep concern among Christians.

If recent history means anything it will be our Christian brothers and sisters, nearly a million strong in Syria, who will be targeted, killed, and driven out just as happened to Iraq’s Chaldean Christians after 20004. Christians in fact are the most vulnerable group in the Middle East, invariably caught in any crossfire between between Muslim and Zionist factions. Unsurprisingly, Israel has wasted no time in opportunistically moving their tanks even as far as the outskirts of Damascus to expand the Zionist influence and power. Nothing new there.

Here at home, for millions of so-called Christian Zionists, the sweeping away of one more Israeli enemy represents a victory, and yet they fail to understand that their pro-Zionism stems from a Christian heresy, wholly based on a literalist and selective interpretation of Sacred Scriptures as found in the Scofield Reference Bible, a mainstay of millions of Evangelical Christians. For example, the Scofield commentary (italicized) on Genesis 12:3: “I will bless them that bless thee. and curse them that curse thee” reads: “Wonderfully fulfilled in the history of the dispersion. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew—well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.”

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